Yes its coming to the 25th birthday for dot com. In March 1985 the first .com domain was registered. There are now around 80 million dot COM domains registered.

As part of its celebrations, beginning in March 2010, VeriSign, the long-time operator of the .COM, will lead an industry-wide initiative to recognise the innovators and leaders that have shaped the first 25 years of .COM and in doing so transformed our economy and society. The celebration of “25 Years of .COM” will kick off with a policy-focused event in Washington, DC on March 16.

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Domains more than ever can provide a great return on investment. Domains are being sold and purchased every day and you can get in on the chance to start and expand a domain portfolio.

I stumbled across an article over at Dotsauce and had to both share and agree. Bellow the top 5 places to get in on the action.

1. Bido Auctions or your favorite registrar.

   live domain auctions on weekdays.  Now one of, if not the most, feature rich auction platform to date, Bido continues to innovate nearly as fast as they sell domain names. Great deals with opening bids of just $28.

2. GoDaddy or your favorite registrar.

   On a tight budget? You may want to opt for registering a new domain. Finding available domains today is very tough, but if you do your research you may just find a great domain for $7.49.

3. Private Sellers (In progress. Submit your portfolio!)

   The are many savvy investors who own a slice of some of the most valuable internet real estate available. If that perfect name you’re looking for turns up taken, don’t be dismayed, do a WHOIS lookup and contact the owner to negotiate a sales price.

4. BargainDomains Marketplace

   A new service by Domaining.com which uses automated appraisal data and recquires domain listings be a fraction of their appraisal estimate. Turns out this makes for some really good deals on keyword domains.

5. FreshDrop Research Tool

   An informed purchase is a wise purchase. FreshDrop can provide some great data on domains that is easy to browse, search, sort and filter. With pro features you can get some really juicy details on Google advertisers and keyword search data.

Source and full top 20

The sedo premium auctions are on so get your self to auction room now!

Moniker/Snapnames recently held a 1 to 4 Character/1 word ccTLDs Auction. Sadly after peering at the results none of the CCTLDs sold only the short LLL/NNN and LLLL in typical .com/net/org extensions , so what went wrong, why did none of the .co.uk and .ca sell?

We believe this came down to lack of marketing pure and simple. Had I not been told via word of mouth about the auction I would not even have submitted a name to test the waters. The investors that needed to see these names had no idea of this going on.

Another point I want to touch on was the quality of the .ca and .co.uk’s that were accepted. Frankly they were of low quality with only a few that stood out. Even then the reserves were very high end perhaps better selecting from moniker would have been ideal I know some domainers out there had much better names to submit which got declined for unknown reasons.

To any company out there running a CCTLD auction let it be known things need to be stepped up. It can be done as MYID for the .ca market has been successful many times with their auctions.

Here’s hoping things improve this new year.